Abstract

TORRES-MAZUERA, Gabriela; DENIAU, Yannick; VELAZQUEZ-QUESADA, Susana Isabel  and  FLORES RANGEL, Jorge Adrián. Extracting the (un) productive trait from communal lands in the 21st century: Point of departure for Yucatan Peninsula capitalist expansion. Trace (Méx. DF) [online]. 2021, n.80, pp.138-170.  Epub Oct 11, 2021. ISSN 2007-2392.  https://doi.org/10.22134/trace.80.2021.794.

Since the mid-1990s, the Yucatán Peninsula, a region usually imagined as a borderland, has undergone substantial transformations triggered by urban, tourist and agro-industrial development. Namely, over ejidos communal lands that encompass, on average, 60 % of the regional territory. The aim of this article is to analyze the regional territorial reconfiguration drawing from the land grabbing debate. To do so, we consider the production and extraction of value derived from changes in property regimes (from social property to private property) and land uses (from forest to agricultural or urban, or from agricultural to urban land use), essential for capitalist expansion in the region. The novelty of this work resides in combining a cartographic analysis that reveals the multiple modalities of insertion of three sectors of capital on the different forms of ejido land tenure (common use lands, parcels and human settlement parcels) together with a qualitative analysis supported by ethnographic and documentary research that shed light on the privatization processes from the perspective of involved actors.

Keywords : land grabbing; agroindustry; clean energies; urbanization; Yucatan Peninsula.

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